Blog

Strong retail leaders focus on the customer proposition, specifically on innovation. To fuel innovation new ideas and perspectives are vital. That's often the reason behind (foreign) retail safaris: to understand what works well or not, see some hits and forecast misses. On a July 2019 visit to London I saw some new and interesting retail formats, worth a visit.

Quite frequently I happen to visit one of the many shared offices the city of Amsterdam offers. I usually go to Spaces on the Vijzelstraat. One of the reasons why I prefer Spaces is their friendly baristas serving great cappuccino, from a brand called Bocca. This is a story about Bocca Coffee and its founder, Menno Simons.

Direct-to-Consumer (DtC) platforms are omni present in today's online retail. They enable consumers to stand out in the crowd, with easy and transparant e-commerce. But what are the key elements of their marketing approach?

The meal delivery business is exploding, with numerous platforms and market places entering every day to get a share of a market estimated to be $1,000bn by 2030. This is a story about MarleenKookt. Not just another mass market meal delivery service, but actually the opposite.

This article is about Chinese millennials, with some insights on how they live and shop. Highlighting some remarkable differences between Europe and China. It was first published in April 2019 in Dutch Marketing Journal Adformatie.

In almost every country around the world you'll find food markets. There are famous ones like the Boqueria in Barcelona or hip ones like the Torvehallerne Market in Copenhagen. I definitely liked the authenticity of Riga Central Market. This is a story about a food market you probably never heard of. Rungis, the largest and most exciting food market in the world.

Retailers trying to cross a frontier and doing some really exciting new things: we kind of miss it. If we see new brands, we experience mostly small, incremental changes. A new kind of display idea, new designs or styles or a different routing. Few physical formats take a more lateral (some call it crazy) route to market. Enter Gentle Monster.

Hasan Minhaj has a show on Netflix: the Patriot Act. I am a huge fan, he dissects Amazon.com and the business practices it has used to grow from an e-bookstore into a powerful, multi-faceted corporation that controls a huge chunk of the online cloud. watch the full 20 minutes.